“Hmm,” I say judiciously. Acting judicious gives one time to think. “Are you saying that Midnight Investigations, Inc., might be forced to indulge in some wet work?”
“I am saying that our job wrangling the private and public part of our human associates’ lives will have to get messy before we can be sure the right people come out of this mess alive.”
Chapter 33
Temple’s Table of Crime Elements
“Nice place,” Max said, prowling around behind Matt’s red suede sofa. “Should I recognize it?”
“Not at all,” Temple said.
They’d “convened” at Matt’s apartment. Her suggestion. It held no unsettling memories for Max to unpackage. Matt would be on his own territory. She was the most adaptable person present.
Max finally settled his long frame on one of the upholstered side chairs, leaving Temple and Matt the sofa.
“How’d you end up at the Oasis pirate ship attraction?” Matt asked.
“Gandolph—” Max paused to eye Matt. “You know better than I remember that he was my former stage partner in Europe and mentor at counterterrorism work for half my life. I suppose he was my spiritual father.”
Max’s blue eyes had become soft-focus as he looked inward, a new habit for the Max Temple had known. “He’s the only person I still feel … felt a real personal link with.”
Temple couldn’t stop her eyes from flashing to meet Matt’s at the same moment. Max’s insight and declaration, if accurate, cleared away a ton of emotional sand traps looming between Temple’s former and current fiancées.
Max was still figuring out his reactions. “He’d been born Garry Randolph. I keep calling him by his stage name as a magician and his civilian name interchangeably. Maybe it’s because I’ve lost part of my mind.” He made a humorous grimace. “Or maybe it’s because I can’t separate what he meant to me.”
“He needs no further introduction here,” Matt said. “I get spiritual fathers. I also get very unspiritual faux fathers, like Cliff Effinger. You know, if that Oasis drowning case ceases being ‘cold,’ this new death there could make me a suspect again in Effinger’s death.”
Max shook his head. “Don’t worry. I’ve managed to bollix things up so much that right now Rafi Nadir is a likeliest suspect for the latest death at the Oasis. And Molina might be eager to buy that because it takes him out of the running for joint custody for her daughter. Fortunately, the probable victim vanished.”
“Why is Rafi involved?” Temple asked. “You’ve said he was a good guy. So any personal bones Molina had to pick with him are not relevant?”
“I say that because Gandolph secretly hired Nadir as our Vegas backup. Even I didn’t know about that. When I crashed, Rafi was on-site at the Neon Nightmare as a security man. He was really there to keep an eye on me. When I went down, he was in instant touch so Gandolph could have me spirited away by fake EMTs, which covered up the murder attempt and made my apparent death convincing.”
“Gandolph has been way more central to all this than we suspected,” Temple told Matt. “The Synth has been looking like some lame woo-woo group of delusional magicians pretending to be powerful occultists lately, but Gandolph’s ‘retirement’ years were spent unmasking fraudulent mediums. Apparently, he still took the Synth seriously.”
Max bestirred himself on the upholstered chair, a sign that his battered frame was revitalizing. “Parts of it. The Synth is not a united front.”
“How do you know?” Temple asked.
“I have Gandolph’s laptop computer from our last recent dash across the Continent and the British Isles. And now I have access to some ambiguous files on his home computer. He wasn’t one to commit the obvious, or the devious, to any lasting form, but he had to pay Rafi and those records are intact.”
“Why are you and Rafi the new Starsky and Hutch?” Temple wanted to know.
“I told you. I inherited Rafi Nadir from Gandolph. He owed Garry a lot, including the recommendation for the Oasis security position. That was a prime job for an ex-cop who’d flunked out after Las Vegas’s current finest homicide lieutenant left him without notice when she got with child. Anybody know why she ran? Was he abusive?”
“Suspicious mind,” Temple said promptly. “She believed Rafi had sabotaged her birth control to get her off a career track at LAPD. They were both ‘minorities’ at the time and competition for the few token slots was harsh.”
“So they both ended up losing out in L.A.” Max smiled at the irony.
Matt entered the exchange. “Classic case of ‘a failure to communicate.’ Forgive the cliché.”
“So why were you and Rafi snooping around the Oasis pirate ship in the wee hours?” Temple asked Max. “That’s the kind of stunt I’d pull.”
“Molina is out of unofficial legmen,” Max said. “She hired me to investigate the crime she fingered me for as likely suspect. She has a sense of irony, I’ll say that for her.”
“But that was the dead guy in the eye-in-the-sky service area above the Goliath casino area.”
“Right. Rafi followed me there in his role of posthumous Max guardian on Garry’s payroll, and I encountered a fly on the wall of the service ducts, armed and dangerous only to himself.”
“So,” Matt said, leaning forward, “you team up with Rafi and on your next stop at the Oasis, you both get waylaid and some anonymous attacker ends up drowned. Why were you nosing around the scene where my stepfather died months ago?”
Max produced a quizzical look. “And you swore you weren’t the possessive sort.”
“You don’t know me well enough to know what ‘sort’ I am, Kinsella. So why?”
Max shrugged. “Gandolph had stored a lot of references to Las Vegas crimes in his computers. Don’t forget that he faked his own death at the Halloween séance to bring back the ghost of Harry Houdini. You can get a lot done when people think you’re dead.”
Temple produced an unladylike snort. “So that’s your excuse for your AWOL episodes. What about this? Maybe Effinger isn’t dead.”
She’d been exaggerating to make a point, but both men stared at her, the shocking suggestion shaking their separate assumptions.
Matt spoke first. “Temple, we need to tell him about Chicago and Louie and Effinger and Ophiucus.”
She kept silent. Did they really want to let Max in on all of Matt’s family issues. Did she?
“Chicago my long-term memory has down cold,” Max told them, sensing they needed reassurance. “Midnight Louie I’ve met and concede is a formidable cat. Garry’s computer notes make Effinger’s relationship and character clear as the battery acid he was spawned in. But … Ophiuchus? I probably knew what it was just a couple months ago, but it’s not downloading from the backup drive. Is it an ancient Greek curse?”
“Not a bad guess.” Matt smiled to recall his genteel mother’s similar reaction to the word. “It means ‘serpent-bearer.’”
“It’s the ‘lost’ thirteenth sign of the zodiac,” Temple added. “Astrologers are trying to resurrect it right now because they say the sky or whatever has shifted since the traditional signs of the zodiac were designated centuries ago and all the autumn babies are not the same scales, scorpions, and archers they thought they were.”
“Whoa.” Max put his hand to his forehead. “I don’t remember much, but I can sense that science was never your strong suit, Temple.”